Boomers are the most competent and wealthy generation of retirees in American history.
Trent, I realize you were just quoting someone else, but … isn’t this kind of a low bar? How many “generations of retirees,” in an apples-to-apples kind of comparison, have we had in American history? Maybe, what, three, if you stretch it?
Furthermore, the boomers will be the last generation for a long time to enjoy, as a generation, the kind of retirement you are describing, since they will bust out Medicare and SS. Gen X and everyone else who follows will, as a generation, pretty much have to work till they drop. In other words, a return to the historic norm.
Boomers won the generational sweepstakes by being born & growing up at the very height of American prosperity, then by benefitting from a huge expansion in education and enrollment when they reached their college years and a huge technology boom when they were just starting to hit their prime earning years, and about 20 years of economic expansion kicked off by Reagan’s economic policies.
The “competence” and “wealth” you extoll was Fate smiling upon this generation. As a generation they are not innately the most noble, most gifted, most hard-working, or most inventive generation of Americans ever. There are generations that could equal or better them in every one of those categories. As the “golden children” of American history, the boomers excelled about as much as you would expect of a generation as blessed as they have been.
Where they are truly exceptional, I think, is probably that no generation in American history has produced such extremes of general character as the boomers. They are the most divided generation our country has ever seen. They are the generation of individuals who burned American flags & spat on soldiers returning from war, and of individuals who served in that war. They are the first American generation that aborted their children by the millions. They are the generation whose tranzi statists may well succeed in strangling liberty in this country.
Thus may the “most blessed” generation in American history end up being the “most cursed.”
Let’s hope not.
